Harald Schneider, our Global Chief Data and Analytics Officer, travelled from the US to open the event in Australia. Harald was recently recognised among the Constellation Research Top 150 AI Leaders, a prestigious list celebrating influential executives who are driving AI advancements across diverse industries, from finance to healthcare and beyond

Here are key takeaways from the four spotlight sessions led by Equifax subject experts. 

Session #1: Transforming Insights with Gen AI

By Carrie Cheung, Head of Insights, Equifax ANZ & Guilherme Sanches, Analytics Insights Analyst, Equifax

Carrie and Guilherme demonstrated how our new NextGen Ignite solution - currently in development - leverages Cloud technology and generative AI to provide a dynamic, real-time view of your portfolio. This powerful tool offers instant, data-driven recommendations, enabling you to ask questions and receive actionable answers.

“We're building this out in layers. We started with delinquency data, then we added bankruptcy data and we're just now adding fraud pieces. We want to do it in a very controlled way because it's all about trust.”

Key Takeaways:

  • Accelerated decision-making: NextGen Ignite replaces traditional, time-consuming analytics with intuitive dashboards that provide instant access to your portfolio data and ready-to-use insights for fast, confident decisions. An included AI chatbot helps you navigate the platform, define terms, and receive expert-level insights tailored to your business.
  • Deeper insights for risk mitigation: AI-driven recommendations reduce friction of analysis and provide a holistic view of consumer credit information and behaviour. Trained on an extensive knowledge base from experienced credit analysts, the system provides tailored suggestions based on your portfolio and market positions. This helps you identify potential risks early and take proactive measures, while freeing your analysts to focus on strategic planning.
  • Faster time to value: Go beyond standard industry benchmarks by defining your own peer groups. This provides a more precise understanding of your performance against direct competitors in real-time, helping you uncover unique opportunities and challenges.
  • Proactive "what-if" analysis: Generative AI allows you to instantly explore various "what-if" scenarios, such as the potential impact of approving previously rejected applications. This forward-looking analysis helps quantify opportunities and risks, providing a clear path to smarter business growth.

Session #2: Unlock the Future: Agentic AI for Smarter Score Monitoring & Model Governance

By Stuart Musgrave, Head of Advisory, Equifax and Tung Le, Senior Data Scientist, Equifax

Stuart and Tung showcased a new tool, initially developed for internal use, that uses Agentic AI to automate predictive model monitoring and governance. This innovative solution significantly reduces the time and effort required to monitor model performance and stability, shifting from manual analysis to instant, AI-driven insights.

“We've seen a significant efficiency gain of over 90% reduction in model monitoring time. What once could take a person about two weeks to run all these manual tasks, can now be done in just two hours.”

Key Takeaways:

  • Enhanced model reliability and trust: Predictive models lose value as they degrade over time. This new tool proactively monitors model health, identifies issues early, and ensures that your models remain accurate and reliable, giving you confidence in your business decisions.
  • Faster problem resolution: The tool’s AI-powered conversational assistant is a game-changer. Instead of waiting weeks for an analyst to investigate model variances, you can get instant answers and deep insights by asking questions directly. This speeds up problem resolution and allows you to respond quickly to market changes.
  • Reduced operational burden and cost savings: By automating manual, resource-intensive tasks, the solution dramatically reduces the time and effort needed for model governance. This frees up your analytics teams to focus on higher-value activities, while significantly lowering operational costs.
  • Proactive decision-making: The tool provides a real-time understanding of your models’ performance and automatically generates a list of actionable insights. This helps you prioritise which models need redevelopment and understand the business case for doing so, ensuring your investment is focused on the areas that will deliver the most value.

Session #3: Beyond the Balance Sheet: The Power of ESG in Retail Lending

By Alexander Marwedel, Head of Experimentation, Equifax Australasia and John Cushing, CEO, mnAi Australia

Alexander and John introduced a new National Climate and ESG Dataset (NCED) that addresses a critical blind spot in risk modeling. The dataset provides unique ESG metrics on all active Australian companies, including climate risk, governance, and diversity.

“ESG data exists for less than 1% of all Australian companies, creating a huge blind spot in risk models. This means many businesses are already exposed to ESG risk without even knowing it.”

Key Takeaways:

  • Comprehensive ESG risk visibility: Traditional lending decisions often overlook the hidden risks associated with poor governance, emissions exposure, and social factors within small and medium-sized enterprises. This new dataset provides a complete view of ESG attributes across all active Australian businesses, helping you to identify and mitigate these previously unseen risks in your loan book.
  • Streamlined regulatory compliance: With mandatory reporting requirements from APRA and ISSB now in effect, the need for robust ESG data is no longer optional. This solution provides the data-driven insights needed to meet these new standards, helping to avoid reputational and regulatory exposure.
  • Enhanced product development and business growth: The dataset can be used to identify and target high-quality, ESG-aligned businesses for strategic growth. It also enables the development of new, measurable, and impactful ESG-linked lending products, such as green loans or sustainability-linked incentives, to drive revenue and meet customer demand.
  • Deep portfolio analysis: The solution goes beyond individual company assessments to provide powerful portfolio-level insights. By analysing your entire portfolio, you can benchmark against peers, uncover hidden demographic and regional risks, and identify emissions hotspots, enabling you to optimise your strategy and uncover new opportunities.

Session #4: When trust gets hacked: how do we navigate AI's duality and champion digital trust?

By Tehani Legeay, General Manager, Identity and Fraud Services, Equifax

Tehani explored the dual nature of AI, highlighting its use in both business innovation and sophisticated fraud. The session focused on the alarming rise of AI-driven scams and the urgent need for new strategies to protect against these hyper-personalised threats.

“Don't accept the black box. Insist on explainable AI that provides a clear explanation of decisioning and results so that it turns the verification result into an explainable narrative that you can use for your operational team, customers and regulators.”

Key Takeaways:

  • Dynamic defense is essential: Fraudsters are no longer using static attacks; they're employing adaptive AI agents that learn and adjust in real time. To combat this, your defenses must also be dynamic and risk-based, leveraging AI to continuously learn and adapt to new threats, moving beyond simple pass/fail outcomes.
  • Prioritise explainable AI: In an age of sophisticated AI, it's critical to avoid black box solutions. Insist on explainable AI that provides clear, auditable explanations for its decisions. This builds confidence in your fraud-detection systems and provides the necessary ‘why’ behind your decisions.
  • The power of connected data: Fraudsters exploit gaps between disconnected systems and data points. By using AI to connect your disparate data sources, you can create a unified defense that provides a comprehensive, 360-degree view of potential threats and helps you spot new patterns of fraud.
  • Deploy MFA by default: Multi-factor authentication (MFA), especially when using phishing-resistant tokens or passkeys, is a simple yet powerful way to stop an automated AI scam in its tracks. The automated workflow of a scam cannot continue if it hits an MFA roadblock.
  • Protecting your people is key: Human beings, not just technology, are the ultimate targets of AI-driven fraud. With the rise of deepfakes and hyper-personalised social engineering, it's crucial to equip your employees and customers with the tools and intelligence they need to spot and resist these sophisticated attacks.
Contact Equifax to discover how our AI-led solutions can help your business enhance efficiency, improve decision-making, deliver personalised experiences, protect against fraud and increase customer lifetime value.